The End
Cherry blossoms
Carrying a corpse around
It leaves no sign of its past self behind
He only who has lived with the beautiful
Litany Against Fear
Each ruler commissioned his own garden
Click
When life is over
That anything in this world should be inevitable
Has it begun to sprout?
The smallness of human life
Into the dampness of a grave
He had the sensation of stepping into the dampness of a grave, and it was not much better because he had always known that the grave was there and waiting for him.
Always allow them an escape route
When you surround the enemy
Always allow them an escape route
They must see that there is
An alternative to death.70. Grave Sites
Problem
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
What if I say I shall not wait?
What if I say I shall not wait?
What if I burst the fleshly gate
And pass, escaped, to thee?The morning after death
The bustle in a house
The morning after death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon earth,—The sweeping up the heart,
And putting love away
We shall not want to use again
Until eternity.Because I could not stop for Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.Not as a star
But I’m warning you,
this is my last existence.
Not as a swallow, not as a maple,
not as a cat-tail and not as a star.I know all about entropy
Adell: I know as much as you do.
Lupov: Then you know everything's got to run down someday.
Pinkas Synagogue
Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall.
During reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored. In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of about 78,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.
But one thought
All earth was but one thought—and that was death.
In the image of their city
They say that every time they go below they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, not passing whims. From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
Fear of death
He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art.
The alphabet
Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R.
Making Death a Victory
Like thee, Man is in part divine,
A troubled stream from a pure source;
And Man in portions can foresee
His own funereal destiny;
His wretchedness, and his resistance,
And his sad unallied existence:
To which his Spirit may oppose
Itself—and equal to all woes,
And a firm will, and a deep sense,
Which even in torture can descry
Its own concenter'd recompense,
Triumphant where it dares defy,
And making Death a Victory.It is going to pass
The character of nature can’t arise without the presence and the consciousness of death.
When we make our own attempt to create nature in the world around us, and succeed, we cannot escape the fact that we are going to die. This quality, when it is reached, in human things, is always sad; it makes us sad; and we can even say that any place where a man tries to make the quality, and be like nature, cannot be true, unless we can feel the slight presence of this haunting sadness there, because we know at the same time we enjoy it, that it is going to pass.
An entrance, an exit
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it
My coming, my going
Two simple happenings
That got entangledTraces
If I leave
no trace behind
in this fleeting world
what then could you
reproach?Japanese Death Poems
A Book by Yoel HoffmanPrometheus
A Poem by Lord ByronDarkness
A Poem by Lord ByronGraceful Exits: How Great Beings Die
A Book by Sushila BlackmanI've designed it that way
A Quote by Townes Van ZandtI don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.Phantom Regret by Jim
A Poem by Jim Carrey & The WeekndAnd if your broken heart's heavy when you step on the scale
You'll be lighter than air when they pull back the veil
Consider the flowers, they don't try to look right
They just open their petals and turn to the lightEpitaph to a Dog
A Poem by Lord ByronYe! who behold perchance this simple urn,
Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn.
To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one — and here he lies.Micromorts
A Definition by Matt WebbThere’s a standard way to understand the relative danger of any activity. A micromort is "a unit of risk defined as one-in-a-million chance of death." For example:
- skydiving is 8 micromorts per jump
- running a marathon: 26 micromorts
- 1 micromort: walking 17 miles, or driving 230 miles
Generally being alive averages out at 24 micromorts/day.
This place is a message
A FragmentThis place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
Winning by Design: The Methods of Gordon Murray
A case study of the working methods of one particularly successful designer in a highly competitive design domain - Formula One racing car design. Gordon Murray was chief designer for the very successful Brabham and McLaren racing car teams in the 1970s and 1980s. His record of success is characterised by innovative breakthroughs, often arising as sudden illuminations, based on considering the task from first principles and from a systemic viewpoint. His working methods are highly personal, and include intensive use of drawings. Personality factors and team management abilities also appear to be relevant. There are some evident similarities with some other successful, innovative designers
You need to make the step forward
Throughout a racing season there is constant, relentless pressure on the designer to keep making design improvements. But there is a limit to what can be achieved with any car design, before a jump has to be made to basically a new design, an innovation. As Gordon Murray says, ‘Given the situation and the pressure at any one time, you do get to the brick wall...I mean you're doing all these normal modifications, you know you can't go any quicker, you need to make the step forward.’
In the midst of the pressure, the fervour, the panic, he ‘used to get breakthroughs, I mean I used to get like suddenly a mental block's lifted.’
Drawing the bits
That's what is great about race car design, because even though you've had the big idea - the “light bulb” thing, which is fun - the real fun is actually taking these individual things, that nobody's every done before, and in no time at all try and think of a way of designing them. And not only think of a way of doing them, but drawing the bits, having them made and testing them.
Like designing things for the first time
Gordon Murray insists on keeping experience 'at the back of your mind, not the front' and to work from first principles when designing. For instance, in designing a component such as a suspension wishbone, 'it's all too easy - and the longer you're in design the easier it is - to say, I know all about wishbones, this is how it's going to look because that's what wishbones look like.' But if you want to make a step forward, if you're looking for ways of making it much better and much lighter, than you have to go right back to load path analysis. It is like designing things for the first time, rather than the nth time.
Wonder Plots
Working from first principles, and working in a highly organized way seem to come naturally to him, but his personal design process is much less structured than the results might suggest. Although he can tightly organize his team and run a complex racing organisation, his personal ways of designing are relatively unstructured, based on annotated, thumb-nail sketches. ‘I don't sit down and say, OK, now I've had the idea, let's see, this is a solution, these are the different ways to go, if I do this, and do that; I do lots of scribbles just to save it, before I forget.’
Gordon’s design process is based on starting with a quick sketch of a whole idea, which is then developed through many different refinements. ‘I do a quick sketch of the whole idea, and then if there's one bit that looks good, instead of rubbing other bits out, I'd put that bit to one side; I'd do it again and expand on the good bit, and drop out the bad bit, and keep doing it, doing it; and end up with all these sketches, and eventually you end up throwing ninety percent of these away.’ He also talks to himself - or rather, writes notes to himself on the sketches; notes such as ‘rubbish’, ‘too heavy’ or ‘move it this way 30mm.’ Eventually he gets to the stage of more formal, orthographic drawings, but still drawing annotated plans, elevations and sections all together, ‘Until at the end of the day the guys at Brabham used to call them “Wonder Plots”, because they used to say “It's a wonder anybody could see what was on them”!’
I never have engineers that aren't designers
Although Gordon Murray carried immense personal responsibility for the design work of his racing cars, inevitably it involved a lot of teamwork. Clearly he has been successful in inspiring others to work with him. He likes to involve team members in the design problems, and for that reason prefers to recruit all-rounders to his team; ‘I never have engineers that aren't designers.’
The problem with CAD
He also likes to work collectively, standing around a drawing board discussing problems and trying ideas.
For this kind of teamwork, and especially for conceptual design work, he finds computer aided design systems too restrictive. For the McLaren F1 super-car, he installed a five-metre long drawing board in the design office, so that the car could be drawn full size. ‘The problem with CAD for this sort of stuff is that you can never have a full-size drawing, unless you do a print, and by the time you do a print it's out of date in the concept stage.’ He also does not like the one-person emphasis of CAD screens; ‘You can only ever talk to one person at once - you stand behind and look over somebody's shoulder, which is not very good for a boss-designer relationship anyway, to have somebody standing behind you is never a good thing. To look over somebody's shoulder at a tiny little screen, it's just wrong, it's totally wrong.’
(On the other hand, he fully acknowledges that tasks like a complex suspension plot to determine the wheel envelope are ideal for CAD.)
Drawing as a means of thinking
Two-dimensional plans or sections can be seen with sketches and more diagrammatic marks all on the same piece of paper in what appears a confusing jumble.’ These sound like Gordon’s ‘wonder plots’. The architects also use their drawings as a means of thinking ‘aloud’, or ‘talking to themselves’, as Gordon put it. For example, Lawson reports the architect Richard MacCormac as saying, ‘I use drawing as a process of criticism and discovery’; and the engineer-architect Santiago Calatrava as saying, ‘To start with you see the thing in your mind and it doesn’t exist on paper and then you start making simple sketches and organizing things and then you start doing layer after layer.... it is very much a dialogue.’
The common elements in these similar descriptions are the use of drawing not only as a means of externalising cognitive images but also of actively ‘thinking by drawing’, and of responding, layer after layer and view after view, to the design as it emerges in the drawings. These observations also confirm Schön’s observation of designing as a ‘reflective conversation’ between the designer and the emerging design. It is the reliance on drawing, and the preference for the immediacy of the interaction and feedback that manual drawing gives, that makes the architects, like Gordon Murray, unenthusiastic about CAD as a conceptual design tool.
A new gestalt
The innovator has a systems mind, one that sees things in terms of how they relate to each other in producing a result, a new gestalt that to some degree changes the world.
Intense activity, then relaxation
The working style is based on periods of intense activity, coupled with other periods of more relaxed, reflective contemplation. This working style may not be a reflection of a particular personality trait, but a necessary aspect of creative work, which requires alternating intense effort with relaxation.
Strategic, not tactical
The working methods of the innovative designer are, for the most part, not systematic; there is little or no evidence of the use of systematic methods of creative thinking, for example. The innovative designer seems to be too involved with the urgent necessity of problem solving to want, or to need, to stand back and consider their working methods. Their design approach is strategic, not tactical.
Drawing for parallel design thinking
An important feature of their strategy is parallel working - keeping design activity going at many levels simultaneously. The best cognitive aid for supporting and maintaining parallel design thinking is drawing. Drawing with the conventional tools of paper and pencil gives the flexibility to shift levels of detail instantaneously; allows partial, different views at different levels of detail to be developed side by side, or above and below and overlapping; keeps records of previous views, ideas and notes that can be accessed relatively quickly and inserted into the current frame of reference; permits and encourages the simultaneous, non-hierarchical participation of co-workers, using a common representation.
The drawing of partial solutions or representations also aids the designer’s thinking processes, and provides some ‘talk-back’. As well as drawing, innovative designers frequently like to undertake practical work related to the design solution, such as building models or mock-ups, or participating in construction.
A small team of committed coworkers
The innovative designer also likes, perhaps needs, to work with a small team of committed co-workers who share the same passions and dedication.